The first software I made that had users other than myself was a Lemonade Stand clone for the TI-83 Plus. I shared it with people at my school using a link cable and, as there wasn't much competition in the calculator game market, it was a big hit. The next school year, I attended a drivers ed class at our crosstown rival high school and found that my game had somehow spread to that school as well! I have no idea how it happened, but it was very satisfying seeing something I made have a life of its own. Ben Brode was on the Search Engine podcast recently and shared a very similar story.[1] I wonder how many other programmers of our generation had this experience.

One thing that my game had that the original did not (and I don't know if I invented this or copied it from the version I played) was a hidden demand parameter that persisted between days. Advertising and word of mouth from satisfied customers would cause it increase, while customers going away empty-handed would cause it to decrease. That turned the game into a kind of clicker where the numbers could continue to go up and up. I also added the ability to save your game by serializing the game state to an image file, since that was the only way to save data on the TI-83 Plus that wasn't likely to be clobbered by another program.

1. https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-do-you-make-an-addictive-v...